Buyer Intent &
Social Listening
In an age where data is the driver to every key decision made in business, sellers, marketers, and company leadership must prove their worth by focusing on revenue. The question we need to ask ourselves is – “are we getting in front of the right prospects at the time when they are ready to listen to what we have to say?” The reasons we struggle with this are that prospects are zigzagging on their self-guided buyer journey (unknown to us), but they are drowning in both content and the claims of a sea of competition.
What is Buyer Intent?
Buyer Intent Data is sometimes known as Behavioral Intent Data, Purchase Intent Data. Put simply, it is information collected on a company or person’s digital engagement activities with different sources of online information.
Until recently, buyer intent data has been mainly restricted to first party sources - i.e. online interactions with web properties that you own and offline interactions like attending your stand at a trade show. These are sources that you control and have access to.
Truly valuable buyer intent data comes from signals that are happening away from your web properties, particularly if you accept that “67% of the buyer's journey is now done digitally,” and that “B2B buyers are typically 57% of the way to a buying decision before actively engaging with sales.”” It is this data that we can now provide.
When a target prospect starts on line searches, following competitors, attending relevant events, or talking about solutions similar to yours, they leave signals behind that can be tracked. Our buyer intent data delivers account-based insights at the level of the individual. What this means is we find intent signals from their online behaviors, in a wide range of publicly available sources on the web. We mine that data to provide useful insights at an account level. We then provide our customers with both company and contact level data.
How Does Buyer Intent Work?
We’ve used words like “triggers” and “signals”. So, what does that mean? Although it might sound a bit creepy, what we’re able to do here is “see” what people are searching for and looking at on the web. We’re using triggers to detect signals around specific subjects. Triggers can be “search terms” used in a search line of a search engine. In the business world for example, when looking for help developing some software, you might search on “application development companies” or “agile application development” or “software development”.
Another example is say you are a technology services provider and your main competitors are offshore companies like Wipro and InfoSys. Anytime our technology detects someone engaging with those competitors on any of their digital channels, whether it's social blogs, their forums, their YouTube channels etc. we would pick up those signals.
Our system runs matching routines to append contact data (like phone number and email address). This data comes from multiple data services as well as a LinkedIn match.
Other triggers are set up to detect signals in social media as well as search. For example, if we have set up a trigger on a series of trade shows and events (probably the digital variety these days) and people start to mention them in social media posts, we can detect those. All these triggers and signals provide us with indications based on people’s “digital body language.” What they’re searching on, what they’re engaging with, who they’re following, positions they’re recruiting for, and news articles they’re forwarding - to name a few. This behavior provides us some idea of their “intent”.
Our customers are then able to focus on
“existing or emerging demand”. In other words, people and companies that are showing signs of activity "more" likely to lead to purchases in your space. You can now focus your campaigns on these prospects, rather than guessing at who might be interested or even worse, trying to create demand where none exists.
This technology is now within your reach
It might have seemed that this is “big company” stuff and just too expensive and complex. The good news is that it is neither. With this technology combined with our expert services we’ll enable you to get on the fast train to revenue success, rather than languishing in the “sidings of so-so revenue.” You’ll be able to build a strong sales pipeline that delivers real leads with real revenue and doesn’t mean you have to spend a fortune to do it.